Wednesday, February 15, 2012

2/15/12 written Wednesday 2/8/12 cont. summer vacation...

I like going on vacation with my kids. There was one summer when the kids were young, we couldn't afford to go any where. What we did was to get a map of our town. We found our street on it, where their grade school was, where the church was and we looked at which streets we drove down to get to each place. We also looked at which way was north and south. Then we looked at where some of the playgrounds were in town. We found playgrounds in parks and at schools. Each Saturday we would get out the map and figure out which parks we had already been to and where we should go to next. We went to different parks all summer. We kept the map in a spot where the kids could get to it. Sometimes on Saturday morning they would get the map out and look over it. They would try to remember which parks we had gone to and decide where we should go to next. One would say "We have been to that one already, don't you remember, it had all of the swings." or" it had the best slide." In the end we were taking containers of water with us. I thought about taking packed lunches and making a full day out of the trip, but we never knew if there would be a bathroom at each play area, so I never promised a full day. By the time that it got cold out we had other activities to do on Saturdays. We had seen a lot of play areas, but there were a lot of ones that we didn't have time to get to. When we were out and driving around town in the summer and we spotted a playground, we would try to remember if we had already gone to that one or if we should try to go to it next. There was usually a lot of debate. If the playground only had a slide and a few swings then it never made the list of possible choices. This was the best, cheapest and longest summer vacation that we ever went on.




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